What is a rag house? Inside the Phoenix plant that sorts 50,000 pounds a day
The trade calls it a rag house. Most people have never been inside one, which is why the name sounds like an insult rather than a description of a sorting plant. Here is what happens in ours, in Phoenix, Arizona, on an ordinary working day.
Where the clothing comes from
Charities, thrift chains and collection programmes end up with more textiles than they can put on a shelf. What does not sell has to go somewhere, and the alternatives are a grader or a landfill. We buy it — unsorted, by weight, by the trailer — which turns a disposal cost into revenue for the people who collected it.
About 50,000 pounds comes across the floor on a working day. That is roughly ten million pounds a year through one building.
The line
Nothing about grading is automated in the way people expect. Bags are opened, the contents go onto a belt, and people who have done this for years make a decision per garment in about a second: category, condition, era, brand, destination. Shirts here, denim there, sweaters, dresses, household linens, shoes, and the pieces that are worn past wearing, which become wiping rags for machine shops and print houses.
The women on our floor run the machinery, load the containers and head the departments, which is the part buyers remark on most. They also decide what is vintage and what is just old, and that judgement is the difference between a lot that sells and a bale that sits.
Where the good pieces go
Graded bulk goes into bales and containers and leaves for buyers worldwide — that has been the export side of the company since 1994, and the U.S. Small Business Administration named it Arizona Small Business Exporter of the Year in 2008.
The pieces worth more than bulk weight come off the line and go to a camera instead. Someone counts them, films them, and they become a Raghouse lot: one video, one piece count, one listing that exists once. Fifteen thousand resellers buy from that side of the building, and the reason they buy sight-seen rather than sight-unseen is the video.
Why it matters which rag house you buy from
Every grader makes the same judgement calls, but not every grader shows you the result before you pay. Bale tags carry grade names, and grade names mean different things at different plants. A video does not. Ask whoever you buy from to show you the actual goods, in the actual lot, before the money moves.
We sort in Phoenix, film in Phoenix, and ship from Phoenix. Every lot ships — Raghouse sells online and does not receive visitors or offer pickup. New lots post every weekday afternoon, around 2:30 PM Arizona time.
Watch the plant
Three minutes inside the Phoenix floor — what a rag house is, where the graded goods go, and how a filmed lot works.
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